Voyage Of Time
(#1–10 of 6)

When I left my apartment in Brooklyn for John F. Kennedy International Airport, late at night on November 8th, neither Hilary Rodham Clinton nor Donald J. Trump had yet secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to be elected the 45th president of the United States. By the time I got through security checks and made it to my gate—where TV screens were broadcasting returns from key battleground states—the race was called. Of course, I needn’t hear the result: I saw it on the faces of the people waiting to board, a mix of utter shock and overwhelming concern that the future of our republic would be determined by the most inexperienced, unqualified, and roundly disreputable person to ever hold the highest office.

As with Terrence Malick’s most recent works, To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, the most alien visions in Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience aren’t those of swirling galactic detritus or primitive sea animals, but those from our contemporary, built environment. The Burj Khalifa, viewed from the night sky above Dubai, looks like an astonishing and abstract assemblage of black-and-white panels molded into a spire. An otherwise unremarkable industrial complex seems to have one inhabitant: a little girl in a dark dress playing with a rock. Obsessively manicured suburban lawns are notably absent of life.

Resembling an expansion of the creation sequence from 2011’s The Tree of Life, Voyage of Time is arguably the fullest expression of the cosmic themes that filmmaker Terrence Malick has explored for the last decade. With the exception of occasional snippets of low-grade, full-frame digital video of contemporary urban poverty, the film follows a linear trajectory from the formation of the solar system through the eventual collapse of our sun. Traveling to the corners of the globe to collect beautiful shots of unmolested nature to stand in for the prehistoric world, Malick also employs various effects to evoke the emergence of life on a planet from the primordial soup, such as drips of paint that seem to flower into tendrils of stardust, or a digitally rendered neural network to chart a map of the human brain.

“Twenty-five years ago this summer, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America premiered in the tiny Eureka Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District. Within two years it had won the Pulitzer Prize and begun a New York run that would dominate the Tony Awards two years in a row, revitalize the nonmusical play on Broadway, and change the way gay lives were represented in pop culture. Both parts of Angels, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, put gay men at the center of American politics, history, and mythology at a time when they were marginalized by the culture at large and dying in waves. It launched the careers of remarkable actors and directors, not to mention the fiercely ambitious firebrand from Louisiana who wrote it—and rewrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it again. Its 2003 HBO adaptation was itself a masterpiece that won more Emmys than Roots. But the play also financially wiped out the theater that premiered it; it endured casting and production tumult at every stage of development, from Los Angeles to London to Broadway; its ambitious, sprawling two-part structure tested the endurance of players, technicians, and audiences. Slate talked to more than 50 actors, directors, playwrights, and critics to tell the story of Angels’ turbulent ascension into the pantheon of great American storytelling—and to discuss the legacy of a play that feels, in an era in which gay Americans have the right to marry but still in many ways live under siege, as crucial as ever.”

“Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not—he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!”